In last week’s article “The Business of Love-Part 1” I talked about how the kissing cousins of intimacy and vulnerability are essential choices and actions (or what I call business) for realizing happiness and success in love and life relationships. In today’s article, I am sharing more about what is essential for your happiness and satisfaction to flourish in your love and and life relationships.
So what other business is essential for your happiness and satisfaction in life and love?
1. Correcting the habit of tending to others more or before tending to yourself.
Most women are challenged by this habit of generations. Being told serving others is noble and appropriate to being a woman is not a bad message or choice, but a message often leaving women devoid of time and energy to care for themselves. I call this mortgaging yourself to buy acceptance, appreciation, or even love and the price women pay is anger, resentment, and negativity with others. Simply put, you cannot give to another what you yourself do not have to give yourself.
2. Learning how relationships in life and love have their ages and stages.
This wisdom can bring you patience and ease when your the needs and nature of your relationship shifts and changes are required. Relationships reflect the needs and the natures of the people in them and to resist change is to resist what you or your loved one needs. As people change-and we all do-different choices are required for maintaining happiness and satisfaction in their relationships. (And did you know relationships shift focus every 7 years?).
3. Realizing what you’ve been taught about men and women-their needs and nature-is not accurate nor useful for happiness and satisfaction in contemporary relationships.
You can love your parents-and, patterns they passed onto you need not be ones you live your life by. Much of what you have been taught-consciously and unconsciously-about women, men, and their relationships, is simply not accurate. Most of what is unsuccessful and leads to unhappiness in relationships can be fixed really quite easily, once you update your learning and understanding of the needs and nature of women, men, and their relationships.
4. Making the mistake of judging what comes your way in your live or love relationship as reflecting your value or even another’s love.
The truth is, what comes your way in life and in love comes to you for reminding you of your capacity, your caliber, and your compassion. The largesse of your soul (and life) does not set you up to fail nor to feel unloved. The challenges which come your way in your relationships simply require your unique responses for making your love and your life “more”.
There is so much more which makes up the business of love and relationships in life…..learning how your personality will excel at rationalizations and justifications for continuing what is not working in your relationships vs the quieter voice of your soul urging your surrender to love, the fear you are taught about emotions hijacking you vs learning to decipher the wisdom emotions bring you, the habits and norms which damage your relationships in life and love, and more. Your relationships can be powerful, wonderful, life-changing when you update your learning about the nature and needs of women and men.